“I only know how to ask…”
Probably the last thing she said to me, so many years ago. Age took her, then. But the memory of the touch of her mind and heart is a wonderful one. So gentle, so nurturing, and yet so very full of purpose…
“It’s a precious thing, to be allowed to nurture another.” Another memory. “It demands everything you have been, all the past – conditioned and unconditioned, that makes you what you are. Though none of that has value in the present save positioning”
It took me over twenty years to get to the point where I was ready; where I had the courage to say to myself – and to another – I don’t know.
“But now you know how to ask,” the warm words come back, almost as though they were said by a hidden group of people, all of them watching that moment. The intense silence that followed it… the gift of the vividness; as real now as when the words were said.
And yes, I know, now, how to ask, and I understand her gesture on that day, half-seen, but, thankfully, recorded so that when watched, again, with the key, which turned its image into a picture on a door; the door opened, becoming something alive and beyond time, beyond the inevitable decay of ‘things’.
We work to provide that moment for others. We have constructed a journey into the self, and, later, into the Self, in which the whole of ‘me’ is revealed, laid bare if we’re brave enough.
We do not expect those on this journey to walk alone. We give up our time so that a hand may reach out to them as they both struggle and triumph – often revealing the lack of opponent who seemed to lie in waiting behind that stone wall; and thereby the real nature of triumph and defeat. The path to the Self is demanding, but the final few yards of that journey are a miracle.
They are a miracle because they align everything in our lives into a new shape, a new perspective, a new relationship with what we thought was ‘around’ us, ‘out there…’
How do you teach this? The written journey is only a map. It’s how you travel that makes the difference. The student (Companion) has to learn trust in the process, which, at the close is exchanged for trust in the Self, the lesser self having been revealed for what it truly is.
Throughout all this, the palm needs to be opened and raised, metaphorically, to the sky. The Companion may think this applies to them, only. But the half-seen smile of the Supervisor may cause them to wonder. That sense of wonder needs to grow from its seed to flower into the knowledge that those holding up their hand are doing exactly the same with what guides them, in turn.
The opened palm held downwards is mirrored in the other, initially unseen, held upwards, in a chain of Being whose flower is Consciousness. We might say there was only ever one hand, but millions of realisations of its intense and loving presence.
She only ‘knew how to ask’; and in that humble power lay and lies the key to a universe of self within Self.
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.
©Stephen Tanham
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Photo Credit: Pixabay
The owl appeared as the resurrected phoenix during my last, formal meditation as a student of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness. At some point, the seeker becomes the seen as the threshold to the mysteries are opened. The wisdom that always lies in wait within is always just a conscious breath away, but humans can be shallow breathers. In my young adult novel The Labyrinth, which is due to be released in a month or so, the voice of an owl cuts through the darkness as teens search for what they cannot find.
“Whoooo Loooooks for Yooooou?” The owl calls out to them.
Ultimately, are we not all looking for our own selves? The truth of the soul that is often only allowed to exist fully in the false protection of the shadows. The eyes, therefore, must turn inward and grow accustomed to the dark…
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A flying visit – Seeing the details
by Steve Tanham
It is impossible to walk around Stratford-upon-Avon without noticing its history, its art or its connection to William Shakespeare. Half timbered buildings are, it seems, everywhere. Statues and artistic depictions of the Bard vie with signs bearing his name or allusions to his work… in every conceivable place. There are, however, an awful lot of details that are easy to miss, unless you happen to be looking in the right direction.
Take the theatre, for example. The red brick building dominates the town. At first glance, it seems out of place, but closer inspection shows it to be an Art Deco creation that has evolved over time to incorporate new spaces and a theatre in the round. The 1932 building replaced an earlier edifice that was destroyed by fire. The current building was designed by Elizabeth Scott, and was the first major public space designed by a woman. It is…
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It was a ‘stream of consciousness moment’; one of those that acts like a time machine. The flash of memories cut right back to my childhood – seven or eight years old. It included the sight and texture of the old bricks of our primary school playground, the beginnings of art at school, and learning about that most romantic of things – ships, or, to be precise, that arcane institution: the Royal Navy, and its beginnings.
All this was prompted by the cardboard drawing of an Elizabethan ship… We needed a core image for the Jewel in the Claw workshop, something that would sit as a centrepiece on the threefold panel at the back of the room, the place of the mystical East.
I don’t often build ships – not even models, though my childhood bedroom ceiling had a wonderful assortment of Airfix and Frog model planes hanging from pieces of nylon fishing line so that they were arranged in a global dogfight that spanned space and time. Ships were slow and cumbersome… But then I met Elizabeth, the Tudor Queen, and saw them from within her eyes, and another world opened.
Queen Elizabeth I understood ships – as did her deadly enemies, the Spanish, owners of the Armada fleet.
The drawing on the cardboard is a picture of an Elizabethan ship under full sail. It took me the better part of an afternoon to measure the original (bottom right in the opening picture) and scale it onto the cardboard. Such ships were a symbol of the emerging naval power of Elizabethan England, a beginning that would see the British Empire rise, literally, from the waves. That empire would go on to reach such a powerful peak that ‘the sun would never set’ upon it. And then, as all empires do, it will fade…
Back in Elizabethan time, the navy will become the cornerstone of its eventual global presence.
Royal Navy: playground… why?
A child born in 1954 will grow up to learn that ‘trading’ (at school) in cigarette packets skimmed in competition against the school walls was very cost effective if your parents smoked Senior Service. One packet of those was worth five, or even ten of the less expensive Woodbines. I apologise to those younger folk for whom these terms are meaningless. They were the basis for our playtimes when I was eight and nine years old. Agree terms, then skim one closest to the playground wall (thereby winning) and you collected a multiple of their worth. Potentially lucrative returns, if you are willing to gamble high stakes used cigarette packets like Senior Service… The first taste of the potential of risk and reward, perhaps?
Senior Service: the name for the British navy – to reinforce its longevity and status over the Army and Air Force. Different today, of course. But, in my parents’ youth, very fundamental to ‘Britishness’. One of my uncles was in the Navy. It didn’t mean much, back then.
On the 20th April, 2018, it will mean a lot, as Queen Elizabeth I watches the rest of the ‘actors’ rise and move across the giant chessboard to take their place in the drama that begins with the onset of Shakespeare’s death; then a clever but pushing-his-luck Christopher Marlowe calling out the cast of players from the shadows of the ‘tavern’ and making mischief… Until the Queen raises her head and begins to rise.
All of this started with Elizabeth I; our iconic sovereign who triumphed over expectation to find herself Queen at the age of twenty-five, inheriting a bankrupt kingdom laid waste by a a psychopath – her father, Henry VIII, whose only focus was a son and heir. And to hell with consequence.
So, back to the cardboard ship… the image that sparked the mental and emotional journey. Good theatre props are usually held together with smoke, mirrors and industrial tape. This one will be no exception. The simplified outline will be spray-painted white with white enamel paint – as many coats as it takes to give it a shell-like finish. This will be mounted onto a black cloth and the whole thing hung, like a picture, on the Eastern partition.
Hopefully, it will look good; and the black and white theme will complement the giant chessboard of the Queen’s Court Floor. But the final touch, if it works, will give it a very special quality, indeed. We’ve sourced two lights that are designed to project a soothing reflection of ‘sunlight on sea’. We’ll be pointing one of these at the white ship… and hoping for the best. If it works it will be lovely… It’s a moving effect, and therefore quite difficult to photograph, but here’s an idea of how it will look – minus the animation. I’m only on the third coat of paint, so the ship has a way to go, yet.
This is the kind of deeply-focused thing the three of us do in the Silent Eye’s run-up to our main event – the annual Spring workshop in the tiny hamlet of Great Hucklow, located in the heart of the Derbyshire hills. You only get one shot at that first impression of a Temple of the Mysteries…
The empty but flying Senior Service cigarette packet, the bricks of the primary school yard wall, the ocean waves of Britannia’s coming and the power of an English Queen to shape the history of a small but pivotal country combine and resolve themselves in a flash, as the last piece of cardboard falls away to reveal what will become the ship; seen entire in the mind, even though it is just brown card, yet, in the room.
On that Friday evening a mere two weeks away, the Queen will command silence with her will; overriding the mischief of Marlowe. As she rises to take control of the mysterious chequered chamber of transformation, she will pause for a second, looking across the Court Floor at the blue East.
Then, she will begin a slow walk to her throne, becoming bathed in the soft blue light of reflected waves as she approaches the place from which she will direct the next two and half days of purposeful and very human interaction…
And then it will have begun…
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.
©Stephen Tanham
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With the April workshop looming close, Stuart and I needed a break from work and headed off for the afternoon. We wanted to pay our respects to one of the influences behind the weekend, so we took advantage of a rare break in the weather. It has rained a lot lately; many of the fields we passed were flooded and the river at our destination had overflowed, drowning the riverside pathways and marooning benches that would normally be filled with people.
We’re pretty lucky my local area… there are no rivers, just the springs and streams that arise in the chalk and meander through the Vale and we are far from the sea. Most of the time that seems a pity, as I love moving water and miss the waterfalls and waves, but with the recent persistent rain I can only be grateful.
Our little river is usually no more…
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Is it perhaps in fingertips
Where poised and ready reflex sits
Sharpened, flexed and keen
Framing March’s calling turn
As brightness fills the sky
➰
Or feet that on an older ground
Had slithered, moaned and grumbled loud
Now, with bouncing spring and tread
A lighter step as though ahead
A different path awaits
➰
Perhaps the seeds delight and stir
Where winter’s less than obvious care
Has left in frozen, fractured earth
A memory of delight to birth
Awakening to the dawn
➰
Or there’s a switch within the head
That says: awake, arise from dead
And live, again, O mortal man
And staggering through the end of dark
Be greeted by the Sun.
➰
And somewhere, does a distant bell
Whose song’s a clear and keening knell
All life awaken – hear it well, rejoicing
That on your opened ears it gently fell
➰
While there are those of earth who
Still and silent now
Unchanging, live on in heart or head
Whose dying eyes, all-seeing, stretched with love
To bid you cross that line to be reborn above
➰
©Copyright Stephen Tanham.
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We can lend our thoughts and solidarity…
David Hogg, (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Most of my followers have heard me mention a time or two that my youngest brother was a victim of gun violence. Fifteen years ago this summer, he was shot in the head inside his home. There was no national coverage, no thoughts and prayers from politicians. He was just another gun death among the thousands that occur in the US every year, most so routine that we never hear about them.
These days, there are too many to report.
Mass shootings 2018 to date: 69
School shootings 2018 to date: 12
Approximately 33,000 Americans die from guns every year, that’s the equivalent of a 9/11 every month. On average that’s 96 gun-deaths each and every day. The statistics are plentiful and horrifying.
“March for Our Lives” rally March 24, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
When I was a grief counselor for children and families…
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I remember the moment, a few years ago, when Stuart – one of my co-directors of the Silent Eye – said to me: “And that’s it, vanished in an instant: all that work about to be packed up, filed away and forgotten…”
He was referring to the hour at the end of our annual workshop during which we tear down the props, pack the period (or futuristic) costumes and collect up any spare workbooks, each one the better part of two hundred pages of lovingly crafted mystical theatre…
Around us is a scattering of people who don’t want to go home… Old friends, returned for their yearly round of camaraderie, fun and some deeply moving psychodrama, are standing in the residual warmth of a living thing which, like a vessel, has held and nurtured us all for the weekend. New friends, wondering what just happened…
I hate the word ‘psychodrama’ but that’s what it is. Hitchcock has a lot to answer for… ‘psych’ because the weekend is a process that works on ‘the self’, involving everyone in a play – a scripted five-act drama that starts off slow and ends with a rush that is all too real. It’s not drugs or alcohol that fuels this, it’s the largely forgotten state of ‘egregore’ of a group of people ‘playing’ at something with spiritual intentions whose success they are committed to.
We play via scripts and, often, costumes based on the characters enacted. No-one is expected to remember their lines over the five acts of the play. But watch any one of our players reading theirs and you’ll see that person giving total dedication to being the best they can be.
They may be a medieval knight, a soothsayer, a priestess. They may be a jester, a demigod or even a Queen. They might even be a cyborg from the future, struggling to become human, and challenging all our preconceptions in the process.
Sounds serious stuff? Yes, but beneath this is a strong and incredibly supportive layer of fun. A very good pub is next door to our conference venue: the lovely Nightingale Centre in this idyllic part of the Derbyshire hills. We are not averse to a glass of wine or beer to help wind down in the evenings, and the included meals in the venue are very good, indeed – and all this for less than three hundred pounds, per person, inclusive…
We don’t do it to make money, as the annual tax return would demonstrate. We do it because it reflects the best of the various ‘Schools of the Soul’ in which we were brought to a more inclusive state of conscious. Over the five short years of our existence we have made it our own, and created our own teaching styles, along the way developing some leading-edge approaches to distance learning.
We are not gurus – we don’t believe in them. We are just ordinary folk who enjoy teaching a deeper approach to life… and ‘playing’ in this magical and creative fashion.
This year, 20-22 April, on that final Sunday afternoon, we will be standing among the torn down bits of electronics, cables, fabric, giant chessboard and well-thumbed scripts. Stuart may well be standing there as the last box gets packed into the car and ask, in his customary fashion, ‘Well, was it all worth it?’
He’ll be smiling his ‘it’s not really a question’ smile, and we’ll both chuckle. Oh yes, it will indeed have been worth it!
———–
For more information on this and future Silent Eye workshops click here or contact us at rivingtide@gmail.com
©Stephen Tanham.
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Let’s call them Octapi. It’s a made-up name, but useful.
There’s an Octapi in your lap. It’s a friendly one. You’ve had it for a few years and you like its smiley face – in fact it has different faces you can use according to your mood.
Moods and preferences are important… The Octapi are very good at picking up how you feel.
You like the Octapi. You like the way it can reach out and send smiling, outraged or sad faces to other Octapi that your friends have; and how it can suggest linking feelers with Octapi owners that belong to people you’ve never met, but share the same interests, likes and dislikes as you.
When you started, your Octopi only had contact with a few, but now you have many new friends through the Octapi in their laps.
You didn’t need to buy your Octapi. It came free. All you have to do is to feed it. It lives on information – your information, particularly what you like and dislike. It keeps everything.
Mood is important… because what you like and dislike says a lot about you. You tend to associate with people who like the same things, so the polite little Octapi suggests other Octapi whose keepers might be like you.
What you don’t like can be even more powerful than what you like. The Octapi colonies, spread across the world, have so much information on you, and people like you, that, they can suggest what you might want to buy, or subscribe to. This is how the Octapi earn their living. This is stated clearly, so there’s no problem with the existence of the Octapi as long as you read the small print and understand that keeping one is not really free.
Part of the small print in the “how to look after an Octapi’ manual is that your personal information – including likes and, most importantly, dislikes, will be kept anonymously – that is, will be kept so it can be useful to the feeding of the Ocatapi colonies around the world but never released to anyone outside of that ‘trusted’ colony.
Then a very clever man from a very famous university developed a program that could infer how you would vote from your social preferences – known to your Octapi, of course. The clever man approached the chiefs of the Octapi and asked if he could set up an experiment, for academic purposes only, which would pay thousands of Octapi users to install his program in the Octapi on their laps.
What may not have been clear is that his program was capable of contacting other Octapi who were friends of the first Octapi and asking them for the likes and dislikes of their Octapi friends.
A few days later the personal likes and dislikes of an estimated fifty million Octapi owners, around the world were safely tucked away in a set of files, which were subsequently processed for use outside of the academic world for which they were intended.
In 2015 this leak of Octapi information was denied. Three years later, after an American election and a British Brexit – both of which used this or related Octapi data – had changed the face of the at least two countries.
It’s all fake news, of course. There’s no such thing as an Octapi, as far as I know.
It takes a lot of courage for a modern newspaper to pursue and publish this kind of story. But it’s now in the public domain, and being discussed in Government on both sides of the Atlantic:
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It was a dark place, akin to madness
Wrought by a grief held in stasis;
Buried alive by choices
Made in assumed ignorance
And wilful blindness.
Rooted in the memory of a past long dead,
That rattled its chains in waking nightmares
And brittle laughter.
Afraid to be seen, afraid to be ignored
To pass into oblivious eternity
Without having lived.
Or loved.
Or been.
And yet…
There was a glimpse, a fleeting flicker
A pause in the cadence, a heartbeat skipped,
When the world stopped.
A point of flame, unwavering,
Steady as ancient stone
That sang my name
And laughed at eternity.
Mirroring the universe
With my soul.
How many times
Had I not seen
Before allowing
Joy to lead my feet
And take me home.
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From twisted flesh and sinew
You dared to dream
To think, to see, to do
And in that doing felt
The Universe create anew
⦿
But doing dares beyond
To tell the species how
Uniquely made it is
Not for that which follows life
But simply what is now:
That mind could put an end to strife
⦿
And all, you said, of peace
Came down, at last, to this:
That talking raised us up
That talking kept us sane
That talking keeps the open door
And throws away the blame.
⦿
In memory of Professor Stephen Hawking
1942-2018
©The Silent Eye.
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